Home is Where…

I’ve recently provoked a domestic uproar by referring to all the snow back “home” in Pittsburgh. My mother left a comment detailing a rambling string of events and occurrences pertaining to the house outside Philadelphia she and my father have lived in for the past eighteen some years, outraged that I could possibly think of anywhere else when I thought of home.

Ironically she failed to mention herself, my father, sibling, or the two felines who deign to grace us with their presence in her summation of home, and obviously those are five very crucial factors.

But where is home really?

Is it that house? The general area of Audubon/Norristown/King of Prussia we live in, or the city of Philadelphia as a whole? Is it where my life as an adult arguably began in Oakland? Is it a dorm room that my keycard won’t let me access any more, or an apartment on North Dithridge I’ve signed a lease for but never actually seen?

I remember coming back for Thanksgiving freshman year to find my belongings shuffled and boxed and pilfered, and turning back the cover on my bed to find a reprehensible collection of dirty socks and algebra textbooks and other things my sister had hidden rather than put away, and thinking ‘Well this isn’t home anymore.’

But that’s more of a detached sense of materialism, of not carrying about stuff. I like the things I have, but I wouldn’t not have won my Cappie and Tae Kwon Do medals if I no longer had them physically draped on my desk. Any of my books, minus the ones particularly signed or inscribed to me, could be replaced. Many of the clothes would do well to be replaced. I don’t need the trinkets and the clutter, they just define my space.

I might conclude it’s just the base I’m operating out of. Praed Street right now, the house in Audubon over the summer, Dithridge after that, then who knows where.

When I say I want to go home I usually just mean I don’t want to be wherever I am. So is home more of a negative quality, as it were, defined by where it isn’t? Is it wherever I want to be when I don’t want to be where I am?

I would try not to dream of quoting a lyric, much less an inextricably middle school lyric, but I can’t help but have Something Corporate’s ‘Woke Up In A Car’ run through my head: “I met a girl who kept tattoos for homes that she had loved/If I were her I’d paint my body ‘till all my skin were gone.”

I’d close this up on a sugar-sweet note for you if I could, but I’m not really sure I’ve got one.